Paul Taylor
Many artists talk a good game of dissent, but Paul Taylor is one of the few real resisters around these days. His Jacob’s Pillow programs in July included the 1962 Aureole, the new De Sueños (one of his danse macabre fantasies, inspired by the Day of the Dead), and his 2006 ditty Troilus and Cressida (reduced), wherein, to Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” his dancers scamper through 15 minutes of love, rape, deception, kidnap, ballet, Martha Graham, and the Trojan War. Aureole and Troilus and Cressida (reduced) also appeared on his November Celebrity Series program at the Shubert Theatre, accompanied by the new Lines of Loss — a succession of soloists and duos who rage and lament to unrelated selections of music ranging from Guillaume de Machaut to Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke — and his 1975 Bach-violin-concerto exploration, Esplanade, which since its creation has evolved into a bouncy, almost slapstick company rout.

Elizabeth Streb
Elizabeth Streb has changed the name of what she does again: the show of “extreme action” she brought to the Institute of Contemporary Art in February was called “Streb vs. Gravity.” The ferociously physical choreography seemed a little less slam-bam and a little more airborne than it used to, but an hour and a half with Streb still celebrates bodies locked in combat with the laws of the universe. Challenge is what Streb is all about, and having demolished one impossible barrier, she and her seven heroic dancers are ready for the next.

Prometheus Dance
All three dances on Prometheus Dance’s Memorial Day–weekend program at Boston Conservatory Theater seemed to tell of women’s travails and their temporary deliverance. Choreographed by Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett over three years, Dievas Mannu/Full Moon (2006), Knowing We Can Never Know (2003), and Devil’s Wedding (2006) were presented under the collective title “Devil’s Wedding.” All 10 performers were women, and from dance to dance, they shared a movement vocabulary that suggested pain, struggle, solace, and submission to unseen but unbreakable constraints.

Misnomer Dance Theater
Like its name, Misnomer Dance Theater, which returned to Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance in July, seems devoted to contrariness. Whatever the rules of dancing or human encounter are supposed to be, choreographer Chris Elam finds 50 ways to subvert them. Elam says he likes to see how people function when they subject their bodies to extreme stress; this doesn’t translate into the kinds of acrobatic derring-do you see elsewhere on dance stages. Misnomer dancers never conquer the detours and distortions they’ve engineered, but they keep trying out new solutions. You get quite fond of their machinations.

Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève
This Swiss company’s US debut at Jacob’s Pillow in August was an unexpected gift. Neither of the two pieces BGTG performed, Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara’s Para-Dice and Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Loin, was classical — but symphony orchestras present new compositions alongside centuries-old works, and ballet companies have to do the same. Para-Dice is a paean to air — its currents in the world as well as the breath inside us — and the women’s swooping undulations in their backs seemed a soft antithesis to the sharp contractions of Martha Graham. Loin was equally mesmerizing, an unceasing sweep of the tides.

Postmodernizers Last weekend I had a chance to check in on two important latter-day postmodernists, Susan Marshall and Seán Curran.

New & newish Helen Pickett’s Etesian , which opened Boston Ballet’s “Grand Slam” program of contemporary works last Thursday, began with a lone dancer adrift on a sea of darkness.

Sight and insight “New Visions” is the kind of title ballet-company directors come up with for programs that are sort of new and are hoping for vision.

The reign in Spain If only the company could return to the local appreciation its international achievement deserves.

Both ears and the tail for this Carmen "World Passions," the collection of four works that Boston Ballet opened at the Opera House last night, was more pleasant than passionate until Kathleen Breen Combes sashayed out as the title character in Jorma Elo's Carmen .

LIGHT WAVES: BOSTON BALLET'S ''ALL KYLIÁN'' | March 13, 2013 A dead tree hanging upside down overhead, with a spotlight slowly circling it. A piano on stilts on one side of the stage, an ice sculpture's worth of bubble wrap on the other.

HANDEL AND HAYDN'S PURCELL | February 04, 2013 Set, rather confusingly, in Mexico and Peru, the 1695 semi-opera The Indian Queen is as contorted in its plot as any real opera.

REVIEW: MAHLER ON THE COUCH | November 27, 2012 Mahler on the Couch , from the father-and-son directing team of Percy and Felix Adlon, offers some creative speculation, with flashbacks detailing the crisis points of the marriage and snatches from the anguished first movement of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.